Intrav set out to redefine the private jet travel experience using a custom-configured Boeing 757-200ER for ultimate luxury and comfort while traveling on one of their Timeless Destination tours. Customers that booked a travel experience with them got a free-iPad, pre-loaded with Intrav’s app to customize one’s trip.
Paper Prototypes
The creative director at Toolhouse, the agency I worked for when I helped design the app, had started on designs for the first couple of landing pages. When I took over the project, I started with some paper-prototypes to sketch out ideas for some of the more complex content and features.
See another example of using paper-prototypes for rapid iteration early in a project:
First Time Set Up
Customer’s who booked a trip with Intrav would receive a new iPad pre-loaded with the Intrav app that would allow the traveler to confirm details about their trip and customize various activities. The app was as their tailored itinerary. The first tour Intrav planned to offer—Timeless Destinations: a Journey Around the World—was going to include stops in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; Easter Island; Bora Bora, French Polynesia; Sydney, Australia; Yangon and Bagan, Myanmar; Agra and Jaipur, India; Istanbul, Turkey; and Marrakech, Morocco. All this over the course 3-4 weeks. Each day at a specific destination had various activities to choose from. The app was intended to help the traveler choose and confirm everything they wanted to do and see.
See additional examples of wireframes that walkthrough a typical customer journey:
Calendars and International Travel
One of the most interesting, and unexpected, challenges for this project was working through designs for what happens when the trip crosses over the International Date Line. Depending on the direction one is flying, they might loose or gain a calendar day. The calendar view also needed to be able to show trips that crossed over the end of a month in to another month. While neither of these challenges were very complex, there wasn’t precedence among the industry standards for how to handle them.
The Good
The Intrav Luxury Travel app was the first native app where I delivered the bulk of the UX design deliverables. While I had worked on native apps as part of the Amazon Instant Video team; as a lead, I was not directly responsible for the design deliverables. It was fun getting more intimately familiar with the navigation and other challenges that a native app presents.
The Not So Good
Unfortunately, Intrav never got to offer their first luxury travel experience, and the funding for this project was canceled shortly after the initial wireframing stages. The app never made it to development or production.